What comes after the future of the current future of mobile?

Back in 1987, I received one of the most beloved gifts any reclusive and certified ADHD indigo child programming prodigy could have hoped to receive:  A Commodore 64. The affordable personal computer.  It was personal.

In those days, one often dreamt about what lie ahead, and it seemed the most distant future I could envision at the time was the year 2000.  The ominously over-hyped and ultimately underachieving Y2K.

Well, as we now find ourselves just about midway through 2012, more than a decade later, we still have a noticeable lack of flying cars and personal jet packs, and only the elite few Silicon Valley billionaire types can purport to live something vaguely close to the Jetsons’ lifestyle.  All told, the future isn’t quite what I had expected,  but we do enjoy some pretty amazing liberties; the Internet for one – at the risk of pointing out the obvious.

During the past two years mobile mania has reached a whole new level of bubble-hype.  One-off standalone social this and mobile social that and 50 million itty-bitty silos all clamouring to be the next best thing.  Despite the buzz, we still fail to achieve a satisfying amount of real mobility.  Our smart-phones and tablets and other callous sweat-shop-mass-produced-techno-widgets remain disconnected touch points in a sea of ever changing systems at the mercy of competing profit driven conglomerates, each with their own horribly oppressive agendas.

I’d like to predict perhaps the world’s most obvious prediction for the next 20 years but it does hinge upon an unlikely revolution of thought and shifts in control: the consolidation and homogenization of a single dominant platform that goes with you wherever you go:  The personal computer of 2030 – reborn.  Ironman’s Jarvis in slick IBM wearable Matrix fashion.

Like Siri version ten-point-oh, only less annoying, and guaranteed to also work in Canada.  Jarvis will follow you around in your car, your workplace, your home, the mall, etc. He’ll read you your twitter-facebook-pintrest-blogger-email-sms-rss feed in entertaining bedtime story format.  He’ll play our favorite song while we chop carrots in the kitchen and remind us of important TO-DO’s.  He’ll direct us to the nearest hospital with the shortest wait times if we happen to miss said carrot and chop off our index finger instead.

We’ll all be just a little depressingly older in 2030, and that seems unsatisfyingly too far away from us.  While we wait for Jarvis, here’s what I’d like to see (and my team now helps to assist in fostering) for 2015:

1. Automotive systems have a dumb-terminal touch screen/VR mode, allowing the driver or shotgun passenger wireless touch/gesture and voice control of all on-board systems, including new AR heads up display systems like those currently found in the luxury vehicle class.  In short, I want my iPAD 5.0 to connect to my car and tell its systems what to do.

2. Mobile commerce empowered to a whole new level where the consumer (which is all of us) is in control of pull-marketing TRUE permission marketing, not advertising agency driven self-serving noise.  I want to be able to book a spot at a restaurant as I drive by, purchase movie tickets as I drive by a digital billboard ad.

I most certainly don’t expect (or want) my car to drive itself, what fun would there be in that?  Ever seen some of the lame Ford YouTube videos with a demographically perfect working Mom over-elated because her beloved Focus has the ability to ‘park itself’?  Executives somewhere thought that’d be a wow-wee great idea and something that everyone would want – but I’d wager their engineers sorely lamented over the bagillion overpriced foreign made junk parts required to power such ‘innovation’.  Parts that are bound to break in all kinds of expensive ways later.   Is this the future?  If so, please opt me out.

Instead, let’s fantasize a little: I’d like my car or my motorbike or my street bike or my flying jetpack to allow me to: make video calls, dictate emails, send messages, update ALL of the latest trendy-social-thingies of the day, shop, research, learn, be entertained, etc.  I want to avoid traffic problems in real time.  I want to see slick augmented reality location based push messages sent to me in real time.

But hold it!?  Much of this exists already, right!?

Perhaps. For the Technorati, the wealthy, the savvy and other equally fortunate middle-upper class citizen having wealthy or tech-savvy friends – some of the above is true.  The proletariat vast majority under-class working folk however drive miserable analog clunkers and probably will for years until all this fancy disparate disconnected not so mobile ‘mobile’ becomes a little more affordable.

Jarvis needs to be in my home, allowing me to take control of countless interfaces in my kitchen and my bedroom.  Jarvis needs to make my office systems work.  He needs to centralize all of my personal data securely and locally.

I don’t know about you, but I want to work on building the Jarvis of the year 2030.  I want to work on developing embedded systems for automobiles and wearable smart microcomputer systems.  I want to work on flying cars and personal jetpacks.  This is the future of the future of mobile.

Well it just so happens that given team Jasper’s expertise and history of protoyping & research into embedded systems – I’d like to boldly assert that hopefully you’ll hear about some of the things we are working on to power Jarvis 2030.

If you’re interested in finding out how – drop us a line!